Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025 | 2 a.m.
As visitors repeatedly come to Las Vegas, locals who work at the resorts get to know them better and better. But why shouldn’t that same experience extend to someone’s first time in town?
That’s the leading philosophy behind Otonomus Hotel, a new property opening near Allegiant Stadium in May. Its owners believe it’s the first “AI hotel.”
“The days of the one-size-fits-all experience in hospitality is really antiquated,” said Steve Escalante, the vice president of business development for the holding group that owns Otonomus. “The spirit of the concept is really to create and provide, through technology, a much more personalized experience for the user.”
Hospitality isn’t known for being on the cutting edge, Escalante said, and there are plenty of reasons why.
Giant resorts and boutique hotels are never supposed to fully close, making upgrades more difficult. Those same hotels are also usually using a hodgepodge of old systems to manage bookings, restaurants and other functions. If a hotel changes one, it’s difficult to tell how it could affect the rest.
“Almost always, (the) hospitality industry is a follower, not a pioneer,” said Mehmet Erdem, chair of UNLV’s resorts, gaming and golf management department.
But with Vegas’ incredibly high gaming revenue, the city acts as a testing ground for the rest of the country. Now, the tech industry is breaking into the city — something witnessed last week at the mega CES technology show.
If some of these tech companies get their wish, robots will be cleaning floors and making deliveries, conferences will take place with real-time translation into dozens of languages, and stays in Las Vegas will be more personalized than ever.
For guests at Otonomus, the customization starts before they check in with a gamified questionnaire and continues as the hotel’s “O Brain” scrapes data throughout people’s stay.
That means remembering details like your preferred coffee order, room temperature and which direction you like your windows facing. Guests will interact with the AI through the hotel’s “KEE” app, which Escalante called a “24/7 butler in the palm of your hands.”
If guests come back, whether a month or year later, what the “O Brain” learned last time will be put to work again.
And unlike most hotels, the management systems that run the property aren’t separated. Instead of the front desk having to call housekeeping to get a towel upstairs, guests can request one in the app and send it directly to the necessary staff.
Part of the company’s future may also be in licensing. Escalante said many hotels “are very intrigued with what we’re doing” and have “a lot of interest.”
“But for right now, we really want to perfect and refine not only the concept but the technology before deploying it at scale,” he said. “That’s where we’re at now because we really care about the experience and what we’re doing.”
If Otonomus’ main goal is a more personalized Las Vegas, Sorenson — a live interpreting and captioning company for events — wants to make conference traveler’s experience more accessible.
Its latest product is Sorenson Forum, a real-time translation app designed for long-form presentations. It works for 25 different languages and dozens of dialects.
All conference attendees need to do to use the translator is scan a QR code provided by the event. The app can handle up to 10,000 users at a time, said Maria Lensing, Sorenson’s chief information and technology officer.
The technology would be especially useful in a destination like Las Vegas, which welcomed over 4.6 million people from outside the United States in 2023, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
For example, with Nvidia’s CES keynote, “you could be listening directly in Chinese or French or Spanish simultaneously while (CEO Jensen Huang gives) the lecture in English,” said product director Sergio Del Rio. “If you provide that service as part of your all-included services … I think that’s huge” for hotels.
Like Otonomus, Sorenson leveraged artificial intelligence to create a robust translation system. The company fed audio of people speaking the languages included in the service to train the AI behind the app. A team of professional interpreters consistently checks that the models used are accurate to ensure quality translations.
Other translation services might have hundreds of languages, but most won’t be very good, Del Rio said.
“We wanted to stay on the quality side of the equation, so that’s why we only provide the languages that we know have a very good score,” he added.
While Del Rio didn’t mention any conversation with Las Vegas properties, he did say that Sorenson got a lot of interest from Disney Paris for its many Chinese-speaking guests.
AI devices for the hospitality industry already are at work in Las Vegas.
Las Vegas-based Richtech Robotics landed in Nevada partially to break into the city’s hospitality industry. And so far, there’s been some success.
Walking into the restaurants at the Orleans, Aliante or Suncoast hotels — all Boyd Gaming properties — Richtech’s Matradee robots will be delivering food throughout the property, Richtech President Matt Casella told the Sun.
But the company’s robots go further. Richtech’s bartender robot, ADAM, consistently drew a crowd at its CES booth, but it wasn’t for making drinks. With robotic arms on either side of its stationary frame, ADAM repeatedly danced to “APT.” by Bruno Mars and Rosé.
The spectacle is part of the pitch, Casella said.
“The human touch is really just the emotion or the feeling that you’re providing your guests when they’re in your establishment, right?” he said. “So we want to make sure that when we’re using our robots that they’re able to elicit that same feeling.”
Other non-Richtech robots have become attractions in the city. Planet Hollywood and the Venetian have the Tipsy Robot, where a giant robotic arm serves as a mixologist. At the Sphere, five humanoid robots named Aura serve as greeters and guides.
But Skylark, another system from Richtech, is all about utility. Its AI chatbot can answer questions and send off different pieces of the physical robot to deliver items, clean floors and guide guests, even being able to use elevators.
“What’s really going to be exciting is getting to this second stage,” Casella said. “We’re past the early adopters now, and so more and more people are getting excited about it.”
Escalante said Otonomus considered including robots in its upcoming hotel, adding that the company believed they’re “part of the wave of the future,” but that they wanted to emphasize the “human touch.”
The 300-unit property will operate with around 30 human workers, he said.
Partners, not replacements
How these advancements impact Las Vegas’ workforce over the next few decades is still an open question.
Hospitality workers are surely concerned about being replaced, with research from Washington State University finding fear of a robot taking their positions led to stress and thoughts of quitting.
But Las Vegas’ hospitality industry is going through a labor shortage, and those looking to add AI and automation to the Strip said they wanted their products working as partners, not replacements.
Erdem said that’s exactly how hotels should pitch incoming robots to their staff.
“The knee-jerk reaction shouldn’t be, ‘OK, well let’s get rid of these employees,'” he said. “If we are replacing jobs, we are hopefully looking at our labor as our assets. They are valuable. And (from) the savings that you get from adapting technology, you reinvest that money to retain your employees.”
But if that line of thinking doesn’t win out among executives, the Culinary Union Local 226 and Bartenders Union Local 165 are prepared.
The unions’ contracts with resorts in 2018 were the first to guarantee a six-month notice to employees for new technology affecting their jobs. The contracts also enables the unions to negotiate its implementation and requires that employers provide free training for positions created by new automation and AI.
The unions in its more recent 2023 contracts negotiated that if a company removes an employee’s position due to new technology, they can get a severance package of $2,000 per year worked. The laid-off employee also gets six months of pension credit and health insurance, said Ted Pappageorge, Culinary’s secretary-treasurer
The required six-month notification gives Culinary members time to figure out where to land in the industry, he said.
“The reality is, there’s no lack of jobs here,” Pappageorge said. “You can choose to stay in those jobs working with the new technology or get training to be able to transfer to other job openings. And that’s a critical piece of this language … to guarantee folks can stay with their health care, their union benefit package, their pension and their wages.”
Culinary has already seen unionwide benefits from the notice.
Pappageorge said that when a new system was introduced to make room cleaning assignments, it could send housekeepers “zig-zagging” across different floors and work stations. With the extra time, they were able to work out the kinks in the system without issue.
But the protections don’t prevent new technology from being added to the Strip. That’s just not possible, Pappageorge said.
“If (visitors are) getting that tech elsewhere and they want it, there’s no getting away from that. It’d be like saying ‘It’s time to take all of your iPhones and throw them in the trash because we don’t want this,” he said. “What has to happen is continuity for workers, and that’s what our language does.”
So why isn’t AI and automation everywhere on the Strip?
Along with a reluctance and sometimes inability to add new technology, adoption comes down to money. While Richtech’s robots may not need as many breaks as a human, they can rack up similar costs.
The Skylark system costs just over $40,800 to operate annually while the average housekeeper in Las Vegas makes around $32,400 a year, according to ZipRecruiter. The $42,000 yearly cost of an ADAM robot is also going up against bartenders who make, on average, around $32,000 a year.
Like most new technologies, Casella expects ADAM’s price to come down over time. He also said ADAM brought a 30% reduction in labor costs at a boba tea shop Richtech operated.
“So what can you do with that extra 30%? You can now have more employees who are focused on the guests,” he said. “We don’t want to tell our customers what to do or how to operate their business, but we want to give them tools that allow them to do a lot more.”
What happens in Vegas is also supposedly meant to stay in Vegas, and constant data collection from newly introduced artificial intelligence can make that more difficult.
“The idea that somehow you are going to check into a hotel in Las Vegas and some tech company (is) following your every move and documenting everything you do, it’s the last thing people want here,” Pappageorge said, “and the big gaming operators know that.”
But Erdem said visitors’ privacy concerns were largely less than people would expect and weren’t usually at the forefront of their minds. Gen-Z tourists also generally have fewer qualms about privacy than older generations.
Escalante said data collection at Otonomus Hotel will be in the hands of their guests, adding that it’s crucial to them that they protect guests’ information.
“It’s important in this type of environment for the user to understand, ‘OK, if you’re going to opt into certain items, this is why,'” he said. “But once you step into the Otonomus environment … you’ll start to understand (that) it’s a much higher level of service.”
New technology also comes with at least the perceived risk of unreliability. In an industry that runs on keeping people happy, there’s little for error.
“Whenever you’re adapting a technology, you must make sure that whatever the friction point is, (it’s) minimized. And that goes for both the customer and the employee,” Erdem said. “It should not be creating new problems for you. It should be removing problems. It should make things easy.”
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